Quote - Here is a good writeup on modeling the face. http://www.phungdinhdung.com/Studies_paper/Realistic_face_modeling.shtm

 That's good.  Notice the planning and edge layout stages.  The edge flow is following the contours of the musculature nicely, and there's a good example  of just any old quad topology vs. properly laid out edges, and how the one that follows the muscle tones and layout properly deforms much better, and looks more realistic with actually FEWER polygons.  Good find!

I suggest everyone check that page out.  It's excellent in explaining it.

This one is about the face. It's just one way to do it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xls25e08sSg

Also, if you can find it these days, there's a DVD set by an artist named Tareq Mirza that walks you step by step through the creation of an anatomical human from a cube through to the complete finished model. It's done in Maya but the techniques are the same regardless of what modeling software you use. His Youtube channel with at least some of the videos from the dvd is here: 

http://www.youtube.com/user/esotareq/videos

There's also Gnomon online (http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/) that has several videos on humanoid modeling, and just about every other aspect of CG all done by industry pros. 

For more dvds there's eat3d.com - huge collection, pretty much an extention of the gnomon library (not the same company but some of the instructors are).

I'd suggest building a collection of instructional videos on how professionals do it as you'll get more consistant info than you will from asking in a forum. Not that there isn't good info from forums and discussions like this, its just that - as this thread has quickly demonstrated - everyone has their own opinions. So I list these video resources because as far as I can tell it's the most accurate in terms of how hollywood does it. If you were to go to school for this, you'd be given pretty much the same info as what you'll get from these sources, regardless of the school. 

In the end, there's no way to say exactly this is how you do it, that works every time, because topology is always determined by the shape of the character you're building, and what you need that character to do. How well it does all that is determined by the artist (or artists) skill and attention to detail. 

Poser figures are not the same as game models and they're not the same as movie models. They're their own creature, mostly because they're expected to be so versatile and end-user-with-zero-experience friendly. There are some aspects that just don't translate to a poser figure very well. Not because Poser isn't capable, but because it would make things so complicated most poser users wouldn't want to touch it. 

In film there are usually multiple copies of the same character, each with its own topology that functions with its own custom rig, built based on what that model needs to be doing in that particular scene. If it's a close-up shot showing facial animations, that's almost always a separate rig from the full body shots in the next sequence. The full body will have some facial rigging, but only what it needs at a distance. 

~Shane

Shane makes a good point, and that is that there are more than one way to do a lot of the topology. There are lots of free resources out there that will show you different ways of doing it. And it would be best to look at as many different ways as you can, so you understand why they were done differently. Once you understand why, you will know what to do for varying situations. Don't be afraid to think outside the box either. If it works it can't technically be wrong, but may be different.

Quote - RorrKonn, please.  Yes, edge loops should follow the musculature of human muscles to provide proper look and deformation.  That's common sense, as well as common knowledge ever since Bay Raitt introduced the technique for Gollum's head.

Quote: "when you model with tri's n ngones and ya SubD once. makes the mesh 100% quads."

No kidding.  That doesn't mean it's a good practice.  Lots of problems can occur with normals and smoothing when doing that, especially in spots where you need a certain flow of edges.  My god.  WTF?

and your forum manners are professional ?

Well since you talk with such authority.Post your character you modeled.

99% of the time it will explode when using the Poser Subd command. It is not so easy to get propoer edge flow when modelling with all triangles. Modelling with triangles and ngons makes it easier to get some kind of edge flow, but then you can just about forget getting it to behave when it comes to the normals.

The reason that I say that is because many characters that are all triangles have places on them the the normals are backwards on purpose. Poser will try to flip them unless obey normals is flagged in the ini file. By default Poser is set to create new normals.

You can get around some of it in Poser by setting the material node to force normals forward, but it doesn't always work right if triangles cross each other.

This character is all triangles and ngons. ray traced shadows cranked up, smoothing at 180, etc....

You can see right thru the character in places in preview mode, and the rendered shadows are not only worng in some place, they are not there in others.

I have made 1000's of game characters like this, and they dont work well in Poser at all due to the normal handling. Shadows will be wrong if the normals are backwards, and things will be missing in relfections.

shvrdavid : Cool game mesh .